The Best Clint Eastwood Movie You Haven't Seen

Jersey Boys, the 33rd film directed by 84-year-old Clint Eastwood, comes out later this week, and it seems a good time to look back at one of the actor and filmmaker's lesser-known but greatest films. White Hunter Black Heart is about the exploits of maverick director John Wilson (Eastwood) and his Jewish screenwriter, Pete (Jeff Fahey), as they start work on a motion picture in Africa, where Wilson, not especially interested in the movie anyway, spends most of his time trying to bag an elephant.

Early on in the film, also directed by Eastwood, Wilson and Peter are enjoying dinner one evening at a quiet African restaurant, when they're joined by a high-society woman who lets slip a crude anti-Semitic comment. Wilson, a real old-world charmer decked out in lily-white formalwear, smiles politely and says that he'd like to tell the woman a little story. What follows is a jaw-dropping monologue and one of the most intense (and most elaborate) insults in movie history. It's worth quoting Wilson in full:

When I was in London in the early 1940s, I was dining one evening at the Savoy with a rather select group of people, and sitting next to me was a very beautiful lady, much like yourself... Well, we were dining and the bombs were falling, and we were all talking about Hitler and comparing him with Napoleon, and we were all being really brilliant. And then, suddenly, this beautiful lady, she spoke up and said that was the thing she didn't mind about Hitler, was the way he was treating the Jews... She went on to say that that's how she felt about it, that if she had her way, she would kill them all, burn them in ovens, like Hitler.

Well, we all sat there in silence. Then finally, I leaned over to her and I said, "Madam, I have dined with some of the ugliest goddamn bitches in my time. And I have dined with some of the goddamnedest ugly bitches in this world. But you, my dear, are the ugliest bitch of them all." Well, anyway, she got up to leave and she tripped over a chair and fell on the floor. And we all just sat there. No one raised a hand to help her. And finally when she picked herself up I said to her one more time: "You, my dear, are the ugliest goddamn bitch I have ever dined with." Well, you know what happened? The very next day, she reported me to the American Embassy. And they brought me in for reprimand. And then when they investigated it, they found out she was a German agent. And they locked her up. Isn't that amazing?

As you might imagine, this about shuts up the high-society woman, who promptly leaves the table (though she doesn't fall). It's the sort of moment you almost want to applaud, not only for its wit, but also because it's so satisfying to see a snobby anti-Semite put gloriously in her place by the hero of the film. And yet something about the scene doesn't quite sit right. Maybe it's that Wilson, who is something of a heavy drinker and a philanderer not exactly known for being a gentle soul, seems to get a little too much pleasure out of tearing a woman to shreds. Or maybe it's that only a few minutes later we see Wilson get into a pointless fistfight and use a nasty racial slur. In any case, rooting for Wilson doesn't seem so straightforward.

And that's kind of the point — and part of what makes White Hunter such a great movie. By 1990, when the film was released, Eastwood was already known for decades as the ultimate man's man in Hollywood, emblematic of both hardboiled masculinity and, in the Dirty Harry films, the quintessential right-wing American. White Hunter seems in some ways like Eastwood's apology for his own legacy — or maybe an attempt to tear down the mythology that surrounded him. He cast himself as a director, tellingly, who walks the line between hypermasculine cool and outright insanity, playing the part of the uncontrollable "artist" who really just acts like an entitled asshole. It's been said that the role was inspired by John Huston, but surely there's some auto-critique going on here.

What's even more fascinating today, of course, is the contrast between how wisely Eastwood seems to take stock of his own character defects here and the degree to which those defects have solidified in the nearly 25 years since. It's hard to imagine the man capable of lecturing a chair at a Republican convention making an entire film about how demented that kind of macho posturing appears to sensible people, and yet here we are. Eastwood has apparently since abandoned any pretense of self-doubt. Fortunately for us, though, White Hunter Black Heart persists, and any time we feel frustrated with Eastwood's public behavior, we can be safely assured that the most biting criticism available is the one he authored himself.

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